


no blade sharper than a lie

by Ganymeme



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Closeted Character, Coming Out, Couch Cuddles, F/F, Other: See Story Notes, Post-Canon, Trans Female Character, technically royai but also its gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-08-09 20:53:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20123656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ganymeme/pseuds/Ganymeme
Summary: Finding Roy standing at her desk wasn’t unusual, especially with everyone else gone. Finding Roy standing at her desk, holding the newspaper and staring at it with a face white as old bone, however, was.Riza's always been a bit of a magnet for girls like her, the witness to many teary confessions. But never before from someone so important to her.





	no blade sharper than a lie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jeminy3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jeminy3/gifts).

> I made a deliberate choice to use the terms transsexual & transsexuality in this, in keeping with the c. 1910s/20s vibes of FMA (and also because I just plain like the words), but this is a heads up in case you really very much _don't_ like it. There's also misgendering of the closeted character, a vague reference to GRS, <s>and a bunch of trans history trivia references thrown in for shits & giggles</s>.
> 
> Also, happy birthday Jem! You requested trans female Roy & lesbian Royai and my queer brain went "what if no cis people in this whole fic" lmao.

“So.” 

Riza arched an inquiring eyebrow and set her teacup down on its saucer with a soft clink. Lili folded her hands and met Riza’s eyes squarely. Her soft chin jutted out with tremulous determination. Riza, sensing something of greater importance than merely catching up on the last six months of gossip, settled back into her seat with a frown, waiting. 

Only once she had the full weight of Riza’s attention on her did Lili speak:

“I’m going public.”

“Aren’t you already out?” she asked. Lili attempted a smile.

“Not on the stage, I’m not,” she said, “and with this starring role and the wrap-up interview and how well the surgery’s gone, well… I think it’s time. I’m sick of dodging every reference to the past or my service record, anyway.”

Riza shifted in her seat, a shiver of discomfort running through her, and glanced down into her own almost-empty cup of jasmine tea. Lili was not the first girl to go through with the surgery that Aerugan doctor offered, up in New Optain. But she was the first who Riza knew personally. Her tea provided no aid in the ‘socially appropriate responses’ department, of course, so Riza looked back up at the nervously smiling Lili and forced a probably-awkward smile of her own onto her face.

“Ah, congratulations?” Riza offered, having rifled through her (desperately small) stock of ‘correct platitudes’ and drawn a blank.

Lili laughed, but it was light and warm, not mocking, so she couldn’t have done too badly. (Then again, Lili was always warm and considerate, soft where Riza was hard. What Lili saw in her—besides a reliable source of hormones—Riza still couldn’t figure out, despite years of assurances.)

“Don’t congratulate me yet, I might still chicken out,” she said. “Dr. Anjelo’s agreed to me dropping his name, if I go ahead with it. We’re both hoping it might lead more people his way, or draw some funding, or…” Lili shook her head and sighed. “I don’t know. It could all horribly backfire, of course, but…” 

Despite having dropped this particular bombshell, the tension remained in Lili’s shoulders, in the sharpness of her gaze. She was still bracing herself for something, Riza thought. A flock of nervous house sparrows had taken up residence somewhere beneath Riza’s ribcage, and Riza retreated behind the remainder of her lukewarm tea in a futile attempt to quell them.

“Would you like me to mention you?” There it was. A couple especially bold sparrows flurried up into her chest, heart skipping beat in time. “I know you’ve quite a network, of course, probably bigger than I know”—Lili was right, of course, and Riza acknowledged that with the smallest tip of her head—“but if you would like…? And you’ve been such an inspiration, frankly, for me.”

Riza had been _what_? She blinked at Lili, cheeks heating.

“I… have?” she asked, bemused.

Lili shot her a fondly indulgent look. “Of course you have, silly. You were the first transsexual I ever knew, and you just… you keep living your life without any regard for _expectation_ or _propriety_ or any of that, as if you don’t owe anyone anything.”

That was both true and untrue, in ways Lili was entirely ignorant of. She knew something of Lili’s family—stolidly middle class, shopkeepers and NCOs—and had certainly sat through multiple teary breakdowns from her over failing to live up to expectations. That was a pressure that Riza knew nothing about, really. Her father would have had to consistently remember her existence to place any _expectations_ on her, and propriety had been laughably far from Berthold’s strong suit.

But for all that they shared a history, had graduated the academy the same year, Lili had never been deployed to the Ishvallan front, and Riza owed the world debts far greater than Lili could imagine.

She wrapped her hands around the base of her cup, to keep herself from reaching for the comfort of a gun grip.

“Oh,” Riza said, a bit thornily, “I… well. That’s…”

“You are _terrible_ at taking compliments.” Lili mercifully interrupted her stuttering, and when Riza dared look at her face, she was smiling with an evident fondness that made Riza’s heart lurch and face flush. “That’s why I don’t tell you more often. But to the point: would you like me to mention you?”

That, at least, was an easy answer.

“No,” Riza said, a little weakly, still off-kilter. Then she straightened her spine and firmed her voice. “No, I’d rather not be known as an alchemist.”

There was a pause, the kind of pause that Riza knew meant she had just said something entirely unexpected and potentially socially lethal. She was used to hearing that particular brand of silence; it was why she usually left the idle social chatter to Roy. But she couldn’t quite figure out why _that_ sentence had prompted it.

Then Lili laughed, breaking the tension, and levelled another of those indulgently fond looks on Riza. Her heart stuttered again, and her cheeks prickled in that way that meant she was probably blushing.

“Oh, Ree,” she said, and Riza rolled her eyes at the nickname, “you _are_ an odd one, aren’t you?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Riza said, calmly. Her heart was still tripping over itself, but when she lifted her teacup, her hands were steady. A peal of laughter burst forth from Lili, and Riza hid her own smile behind her raised cup. She was never entirely certain why Lili continued to be friends with her, especially with Riza now regularly gone from the city for months at a time, but she certainly knew why she continued to be friends with Lili. 

~

As it turned out, Lili did go ahead with the interview and the revelations of her transsexuality in a disarmingly charming radio interview that was re-broadcast several times over the next three weeks. Lili Rosepettle had been well known in drama circles as a rising star, but in those three weeks she swiftly became a household name.

Though Riza had not asked it of her specifically, Lili did in fact avoid mentioning her by name anywhere. It wasn’t so much that Riza wasn’t public about her own transsexuality; she made no effort to keep it a secret. Roy and Breda possibly had a point about her being a reclusive antisocial hermit, though—not that she’d ever admit it to them. But it didn’t come up much, any of it: not her gender, and certainly not her alchemy. That instinct towards privacy meant Riza watched Dr. Anjelo’s and Lili’s names become common on everyone’s lips with no little relief at her own absence.

Several articles appeared in various papers, all more or less scandal-chasing trash, until Lili wrote her own article for the Dawn Herald, the pre-eminent weekly for East City. Riza had picked one up that Friday on her lunch break, but never read it. The entire afternoon had been derailed by Major-General Halcrow calling an emergency telephone meeting thanks to some sort of chimera bandit infestation. Even once they’d escaped the call, the rest of the afternoon was spent playing catch up on the end of week paperwork.

It was going on 1900 hours when Riza returned, yawning and bleary-eyed, from the copier’s room down the hall with a final sheaf of papers in her hands. Finding Roy standing at her desk wasn’t unusual, especially with everyone else gone. Finding Roy standing at her desk, holding the newspaper and staring at it with a face white as old bone, however, was. Riza let the door swing shut behind her and gave in to the jaw-cracking yawn she’d been fighting back the whole way down the hall.

Then she crossed the room in several swift strides, dropped the papers in her outbox, and rubbed her eyes. She had no idea what could be in the paper that would make Roy blanch like that; his constitution usually held up quite well. Unless the date of a concert or opera performance had been changed, or the Armstrongs had made the paper again. It had also been a very long day, and Halcrow always set Roy even further on edge. Bracing herself for a full-force bout of Mustang dramatics, Riza sighed and asked,

“Something the matter, sir?”

Roy… flinched. He flinched, short and sharp and violent, the paper shaking in his hands, and pain etched a deep vee into his brow. Riza nearly jumped herself, at that response, and the molasses-lazy grogginess evaporated. She stared, trying to read answers in the pinch of Roy’s mouth and the white of his knuckles. None came to her. And Roy, compulsively loquacious Roy, who used words the way Riza used hard glares, was silent.

“Sir?” she tried again, a needle of worry worming through her. He flinched, again, though less this time, more contained, as if prepared for the blow. Guilt, in perfect echo, spiked through her. Surely it wasn’t anything to do with Ishval, with the weight of the military’s crimes, she would have—_they_ would have—heard something, if the Herald had dropped some sort of scathing exposé.

But before Riza could figure out what to say or how to ask, Roy looked up at her and her heart lodged somewhere in her throat. That vee was still sunk into his brow, beneath the disheveled fall of his bangs escaped from the day’s attempt at taming, and he was still bone-pale, but it was his eyes that did it. Glassy and tormented and so evidently _seeking, _searching Riza’s face with a desperation that felt—

Familiar. Felt like one she’d seen before, on other faces, faces she knew not nearly as well as this one.

Roy licked his lips and inhaled shakily, his breath ragged and loud in the empty room. Riza, as she always did, waited. (That was the thing with Roy, the thing that made them work so well. He was like a cat, in a way. Push him too hard and he’d go the opposite way just to spite you, but wait silent and still and he would, eventually, reach forward to meet you. Riza was good at silent and still, was good at waiting.)

“How—” he swallowed, visibly—“How did you… know?”

The final pieces of the puzzle dropped into place in her mind so clearly that it felt the way cocking a gun sounded. One of the faces Riza had seen that look on had been Lili’s own, a decade ago.

“Oh,” Riza said, the vowel barely more than a breath. She had no idea what her own face was doing, but Roy’s twisted, fighting back the tears he always denied himself. “Lili’s article.”

It wasn’t a question, but Roy nodded anyway, opened his mouth as if to say something, then shut it, pain turning pleading.

“Come home with me,” Riza said quietly, “and we’ll talk there.”

The speed with which Roy cleared out of the office wasn’t unusual, but the funereal silence was, and Riza’s heart stayed in her throat the whole way out to her car. Roy flinched at every “sir” that accompanied a salute as they left headquarters. His shoulders hunched, body curling in protectively, and the further they got from the office, the further her heart splintered into sharp, sorrowful shards.

~

It is closing in on 2100 hours, now, when Riza returns from her kitchen with two mugs of peppermint tea. Roy is curled up on the couch, bundled up in one of the hideous but amazingly warm throw blankets Gracia made while pregnant with Elicia, petting Hayate. It’s always shamed her, some, how tricky it can be to change how you see someone. The begrudging sympathy for her father’s callousness that it draws up is never appreciated, and now it makes her grit her teeth and close her eyes, try and shake the image of Roy-as-_he_ from her head. Try to see Roy how she’s asked to be seen. So, Riza looks again.

Her eyes and nose are puffy and red, and Roy droops where she sits, clearly exhausted in the aftermath of more genuine, heart-rending emotion than either of them has ever been comfortable with. That’s how it goes with Roy, though, in Riza’s experience. All or nothing, glittery pyrite nonchalance or an inferno, an abyss.

Right now, however, Roy is staring into the middle distance. But after a moment she blinks and rouses and smiles vaguely in Riza’s direction. Whatever dazed stupour she was in, it wasn’t the shellshock rearing its nasty head. Relieved, Riza closes in and sets both mugs on the battered old coffee table in front of the couch. She drops down heavily to sit beside Roy. 

Hayate’s eyes open and he whines, tail thwapping half-heartedly against the upholstery. The shiba doesn’t move an inch though, with Roy’s fingers still slowly scratching behind his ears. Roy, however, immediately shifts to cuddle up against Riza, wrangling the massive purple-green-mauve blanket so it covers both of them.

Riza snorts. “Sook,” she says, meaning the dog, but Roy makes a low noise of protest in her throat.

Riza laughs, and reaches up to run her hand through Roy’s hair, digging her fingers in at the base of her skull where knots of muscle always build up.

“Yes, you too, I guess,” Riza says, amused, and Roy grumbles wordlessly but pushes her head back into Riza’s hand, eyelids fluttering shut.

The silence that descends is, for the first time in the past two hours, easy. Roy’s weight, curled up against Riza’s shoulder, is a familiar furnace. She may have accidentally arranged herself to be out of reach of her own mug of tea but she can’t really regret it. She does regret the circumstances a little, that it’s taken an earthquake upheaval of Roy’s worldview and identity to bring them back here for the first time in years.

She slides a hand under Roy’s shirt to rest against the bare skin of her stomach. The slippery-smooth texture of burn scars catch her by surprise, reminding her of just how long its been. Roy sighs and reaches forward cautiously, not wanting to disturb Hayate in her efforts to retrieve the mug of tea.

She passes the first one she grabs back to Riza and manages to only disturb Hayate enough to earn another whine in grabbing the second. She clears her throat, and Riza does her best not to tense up.

“I didn’t think I was allowed, is the thing,” Roy says, slow and raspy, voice hoarse from earlier sobs wrenched painfully from her throat. It’s the first time since they were teenagers that Riza’s seen her actually properly cry, and if it’s always such a horrible experience, Riza can see why she tries not to. This, at least, is a relatively light topic. 

Riza sighs and presses a kiss to the side of Roy’s head, just above her ear.

“Idiot,” she says, not without fondness, though she isn’t sure how well that shows through in her tone. “You’ve known _me_ since I was twelve. And considering you had to explain wet dreams to me, you obviously knew I wasn’t a cis girl.”

Roy laughs, a rough bark, that turns into a cough. When she catches her breath she sips the tea in long, loud slurps until finally relaxing back further into the cradle of Riza’s body.

“I know, I know,” Roy says, “but you’re… you’re _you_. And I’m me and…” She waves a hand, vaguely, in a way Riza supposes is meant to indicate the entirety of existence, not just her floor lamp’s crooked lampshade.

Hayate whines again and the waving hand obediently returns to ear-scritching duty.

“I suppose it’s not a logical thing at all, though,” Roy says thoughtfully. Riza snorts. The tides of emotion have clearly ebbed, if Roy’s moved into philosophical musings. It was the one thing sure to get Riza’s father to actually send his adolescent apprentice to bed at a reasonable hour; an exhausted Roy turned positively poetic, and Berthold had always despised poetics. 

“Isn’t it?” Riza counters. “It always seemed fairly direct to me, once I figured out what the problem was.”

It’s Roy’s turn to snort with laughter. “_Hawkeyes_,” she says, exasperated, and Riza arches a querying eyebrow despite the fact that Roy can’t see her face.

“Of course you look at the impossible and see a _puzzle_.”

Riza’s stomach twists, as it always does at any comparison to her father, but she settles it with the reminder that this is _Roy_, the only other person on the whole planet who knew her father in any way remotely akin to her. She swallows thickly and takes too large a sip of her tea, burning her tongue.

There’s a moment of silence and then, even though Riza has said nothing, Roy says quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Riza says, and for once it isn’t a forced platitude, dredged up from her slim book of etiquette knowledge. There is a whole list of things they don’t talk about, not explicitly, and Berthold Hawkeye is several of them. Before today, Riza would probably have counted her transsexuality on there as well, but now… 

She sips her tea slower, this time, contemplating. Most of her just wants to keel over and sleep for two days straight, but the rest of her is buzzing, calculating, attempting to account for all possibilities of what Roy chooses to do with this newfound self-knowledge. (And the smallest part of all, the part she does her best to ignore, is already thinking of hormone arrays and dosages.)

“I feel like an idiot, though,” Roy says, interrupting Riza’s meandering thoughts with her clockwork self-recrimination. 

Riza rolls her eyes because honestly, Roy can be so terribly predictable. “Revenge for when I was twelve, clearly.” 

“Hah.” Roy fiddles with her mug, toys with Hayate’s ear until he grumbles and tosses his head. The quiet, broken only by Hayate’s snuffling, stretches out between them until finally she asks, “What do I do now?”

Riza’s heart breaks a little at the quiet fear beneath those words. But she has an answer for that, at least. (The same one she gave Lili, all those years ago.) She rests her cheek on Roy’s head.

“Whatever you want. However fast or slow you want it.”

“Oh,” Roy says, quietly. She’s still fiddling with the mug. Riza sets her own down, on the floor since she can’t quite reach the table, and reaches around to tug the mug free from Roy’s hand. She deposits that on the floor as well, then captures the hand itself, tangling their fingers together. She can feel the rough scarring on the back with her palm and the scar on her throat aches in sympathy.

Roy squeezes her fingers once, tight.

“... I tried to convince the Madame to rename me, once,” she says. Riza, who forged her own birth certificate when she was eight, waits, silently. Eventually, Roy fills that silence.

“She said no. Said she didn’t see why a boy should want a different name, when she was a woman with a boy’s name herself.”

Riza can hear the rueful smile in Roy’s voice as she speaks, though she can’t see it.

“I still signed all my diary entries as ‘Rosie’ for… damn. Years.” 

That Riza can’t just let slide by without comment.

“And you still thought you weren’t trans?”

Roy snorts. “I knew I wasn’t very good at being a boy, but I didn’t even know about transsexuals until I met you. And even then, I don’t think you ever said that word.”

“No,” Riza agrees, “I wouldn’t have. I didn’t learn the words for it myself until I moved away.”

She considers this anecdote, then, and the words preceding it, and cautiously asks, “Would you… like me to call you Rosie? In private?”

Roy winces. “No, no,” she says. “That’s too… childish.”

Riza hums. “What about Rose? Roza?”

“Roza?” Roy repeats, and she’s shifted her grip on Riza’s hand so she can stroke her thumb along the side of Riza’s palm and it’s horribly distracting. Try as she might, Riza can’t read anything in those syllables besides bemusement. “Isn’t that too close to Riza?”

“I don’t have exclusive stake on the letters r, z, and a,” she says drily.

Roy leans her head back, enough that Riza can see the smirk, and the devilish glint in those tear-reddened eyes. “Could have fooled me,” Roy says, sounding brighter than she has all evening. “Surely a woman as beautiful as you has dominion over all she touches.”

Roy at her worst is, as always, utterly ridiculous and cheesier by half than any of those cheap novels Rebecca was forever leaving all over their dorm room. Riza blushes anyway, and glares at her dog rather than look at the woman cuddled up against her.

“...You must be feeling better,” she says, and Hayate lifts his head and cocks it, curious, clearly puzzled by Riza looking at him but speaking in a grumble.

“Mmm,” Roy hums, and squeezes her hand, that soft, teasing thumb-stroking finally stopping. “Delirium, I think. I didn’t sleep last night. But you are beautiful, you know.”

Riza’s face is burning. It is on fire, it must be, and Roy’s figured out how to do flame alchemy with words alone.

“Flatterer,” she mutters, still staring fixedly at her increasingly confused dog.

“I try,” is the too-cheery response. Riza rolls her eyes. There are half a dozen responses she could make to that, each more cutting than the last, but she bins all of them in favour of a weary but only mildly exasperated,

“Get some sleep, you fool.”

Roy sighs dramatically and burrows deeper into the blanket, her head slipping down to lay more in Riza’s lap than on her shoulder.

“You fool,” she repeats, half-muffled by toxic-puce-coloured blanket, “or your fool?”

Riza lets the silence stretch on long and loud enough to make sure that Roy gets the point.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she begins to say, but then dark eyes blink up at her, from the ugly-blanket-cocoon. They’re still puffy, and Roy’s hair is a mess, but there’s something lighter about her face, as if some small part of the weight they both carry has been lifted.

“Yes,” Riza says with a small sigh. “My fool.”

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to SerendipitousOracle for being my beta again! They were all "stop being bad, be good instead", which is excellent advice. :P (And also very groggy when they beta'd this.)


End file.
